I float small details 99% of the time here at work. No time to model it all in. After your pretty art asset is crunched down to a 1024 or smaller you'll NEVER see a difference between floating detail and non floating detail anyways.
I think the main issue with floating geometry is the wasted memory on the portions under the floater. You don't see it, but it still takes up texture memory. They'd have to be small to not have a wasteful impact. For normal baking, I don't think that would matter so long as the edges of the floater are parallel to the high…
Well, the only bad things with it that I can think of at the moment would be possible z-fighting. And sometimes it means you'll have a bit extra wasted texture-space (though mostly that can be filled in). And then there's shadowcasting, where it might come out pretty odd if you use floating elements. Though generally I…